Future Challenges

Abstract

The Millennium Technology Prize is awarded every second year to inspire and recognize technological innovations that provide answers to some of the challenges of our time and particularly improve the quality of human life and sustainable development.¹ In terms of monetary value and public esteem, the prize ranks as one of the world’s most prestigious scientific awards. The first Millennium prize in 2004 was awarded to Sir Tim Berners-Lee for inventing the Word Wide Web. The potential of the web to influence the lives of billions of people in a beneficial way was one of the key reasons for awarding the prize to him. However, in spite of an enormous number of applications having been and being built on top of Sir Berners-Lee’s achievement, the future humanized web also holds many challenges and even threats for mankind. These include the failure, after all, to augment human intellect, unintended consequences and intended malicious action. It will be interesting to see whether the web can be elevated into a science of its own and whether it can help solve any of the really hard world-scale problems.